Even in a great collection of Civil War artifacts, the gold pocket watch owned by legendary Confederate Maj. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson would be ranked as a treasure.

So would Southern cavalry commander J.E.B. Stuart’s 6-shot, .36-caliber Navy revolver — not to mention an iron pike commissioned by fiery abolitionist John Brown with the intent of arming his hoped-for slave insurrection.

In a new exhibit at the Hampton History Museum, however, these landmark objects from the Virginia Historical Society take on second lives as storytellers.

Jackson used his watch to time his famously fleet-of-foot troops, for example, insuring they got the hourly breaks that helped them move with such unexpected speed — earning them both Confederate admiration and Yankee fear as “Jackson’s foot cavalry.”

“It all starts with the object,” says historical society exhibit coordinator Andrew Talkov, talking about the development of the Civil War 150th anniversary show “An American Turning Point: The Civil War in Virginia.”

“We wanted to tell the story of the Civil War through its impact on the everyday lives on the people who experienced it here in Virginia — and the best way to do that is through objects, pictures and documents that can take you there.”

Unveiled at the society’s Richmond galleries in February 2011, “Turning Point” will appear at the Hampton museum in two consecutive parts, the first of which focuses on the ways in which the war was waged.

Artifacts play a major role in telling such stories as the role of maps in Jackson’s legendary Shenandoah Valley campaigns. But visitors will also find themselves learning about the conflict and its causes through video, audio effects and computer interactives.

In “Why Did the Civil War Happen?” for example, a dramatic series of photographs, artwork and maps appears on a touch-activated screen, mixing with political cartoons, newspaper clippings and spoken quotations to quickly yet dramatically review the tensions that erupted long before the war started.

Another monitor enables visitors to not only pick out specific Virginia battles but also see how the resulting causalities were distributed in both Federal and rebel units as well as individual states and counties.

Soldiers from both sides encountered such violence during the 1864-85 Overland Campaign around Richmond that some 70,000 men fell wounded or dead in 39 days.

“I had seen dreadful carnage in front of Marye’s Hill Fredericksburg,” Confederate Brig. Gen. Evander M. Law wrote, describing the Union losses at the Battle of Cold Harbor.

“But I had seen nothing to exceed this. It was not war; it was murder.”

Personal stories help make that unimaginable slaughter become real.

The first amputee of the war, for example, was James E. Hangar of Churchville, whose dissatisfaction with the primitive prosthetics of the day led him to whittle barrel staves into a much more functional version of his own.

By 1919, the enterprising inventor of the “Hangar Limb” had opened branch offices in London and Paris as well as Atlanta, Philadelphia and St. Louis. The company he founded is still in business 151 years after the Civil War started.

Union surgeon Alexander Augusta, in contrast, was one of 15,000 doctors who combined to conduct an estimated 60,000 amputations. The Norfolk native was also the first of eight black surgeons who would serve in the Federal army.

Among the most evocative of these stories is that of famed Virginia general Jubal Early, whose portrait provides the centerpiece of “Do You Know this Man?”

Though often cited for valor and his 1864 raid on Washington, D.C., Early — like many other delegates to the Virginia Convention of April 1861 — had been a strong Unionist who voted against seceding. He refused to sign the Ordinance of Secession until it had been passed by voters.

Nevertheless, Early volunteered soon after the war started. Following the South’s defeat, he fled to Mexico — then returned to become a passionate advocate of the “Lost Cause.”